“What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who give your arguments a fair hearing and the simply persists in his lunacy?”
Well, sure, why not. I hadn’t read this since high school, and I’m a huge Orwell fan, so I thought I’d re-read it along with everyone else. Unsurprisingly, I found a lot of really smart ideas in here, but I was surprised at how dull the book is as a novel. The characters — especially women — are flat as pancakes, the plotting is glacial, the descriptions are relentlessly repetitive. But those disappointments aside, there are surely many incisive and prescient passages.
Winston’s job is to adjust the past to suit the ideological needs of the present: “Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.”
Well, that sounds familiar!
Or: “Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.” Not far off from the methodology of Alex Jones or his fans.
I’d forgotten the whole thing about the government developing a new language (“Newspeak”) which would make the expression of dissent literally impossible. Thus “the Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect,” a terrifying idea and one worth considering in contemporary terms.
Retrograde attitudes toward women; embarrassing romanticization of “the Proles”; a somewhat obsessive need to follow every idea out to its logical extreme; but of course at the same time a work of terrific insight. I don’t at all mean to sound condescending when I say that high school was after all exactly the right time to read it first.
Being sick loosens the customary strictures of my TV ethos. Normally, oppressed by my needs to maximize efficiency and minimize shame, I mostly try to watch things I haven’t seen before and things that aren’t total garbage. But six days on the sofa with the flu lends license to revisit old things and wallow in crap.
ABC News, lagging in ratings, needed something splashy to draw in viewers, so they hired liberal Gore Vidal and conservative William F. Buckley, Jr. to debate on camera during the 1968 Democratic and Republican national conventions, knowing full well that these two masters of repartee would provide good entertainment. And entertain they did, as this excellently made documentary shows. One potential reaction to this story is to say, “Back then there were real intellectuals on TV, debating the issues, how sad that these days all we have is shallow demagoguery on the ‘real’ news networks, and the only serious journalists on television are, ironically, comedians (John Oliver, Samantha Bee, Larry Wilmore, Jon Stewart, etc.)” That’s not my take. Watch Vidal and Buckley “debate,” and you quickly realize that their discourse was all about contempt, point-scoring, sophistry, and adamant refusal to acknowledge the very humanity of the other. These guys don’t represent some prelapsarian alternative to our contemporary crisis of journalism, where noise masquerades as signal; they represent its beginnings. Super worth watching, especially between now and November 8.